For the most part we (by “we” I mean those of us on the left, yes I will own up to being something of a leftist, whatever that means) like to say that all capitalism, and its governing libertarian sentiment, desires is for there to be no limit at how much one can take for one’s self. It is a creed of the indulgent and the rich. Greed, selfishness, isolationism, sterile individualism and other nasty things, are what we enjoy making capitalism out to be.

With such an opener, what might wonder what it is that Rocha then finds to praise in capitalism. What he find is, I think, not at all unique to capitalism narrowly defined, but it is something which those of us in the West are much attached to:

If we can cut-out the name calling, I think we can find a powerful meaning within capitalist sentiment. Namely, the much-abused, taboo, and rejected idea of the individual, the person-singular. I think that if we take notions of private property and negative freedom (”freedom from”) inherent in capitalist sentiment, and ponder what they mean, we will find that we all value such things privately....

Here is my defense: Capitalism, as it is believed in benevolently, reminds us of our radical existence as images of God with a potency to as we wish within the vast sea of possibility. What we need next is the ability to control ourselves with the prudence, grace, and love of our Creator in this stormy sea of freedom. But we should never be too quick to accept external-control over our bodies, minds, and hearts. We need to be free. And perfect freedom is not the raw, brute force of libertarianism, to be sure. At the same time, it also is that imposing force.

I don't find what Rocha finds to praise unappealing, but at the same time I think that there is something more to be found in capitalism as described by Adam Smith and others which even many of those who frequently condemn capitalism would find it in themselves to admire if they could look past their preconceptions and see Smith-ian capitalism for what it is.

The following is based on my efforts over the last few week to keep up with the folks over at the EconTalk book club as they work through Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (a book he wrote before On the Wealth of Nations but continued to revise until his death). I've not finished the book yet, nor indeed have I been able to make it through as fast as the podcasters have been doing so, but it's been an enjoyable experience and I may well be writing more about the book once I'm done.

First, I think it's important to understand that Smith in both his famous works is engaged in what he considers a descriptive rather than a prescriptive exercise. He does offer judgments and advice at times, but he is not attempting to set forth an order which, if followed, would result in a utopia (which is the Marxist project) but rather to describe how things work. In this sense, one probably does well to think of Smith in the context of a society shaped by English common law attitudes, where intricate order emerges from thousands of small decisions over hundreds of years rather than being planned at a single sitting.

Next, let us take a moment on Smith's concepts of morality, on which the Theory of Moral Sentiments is focused. Smith seems to draw moral notions from two primary sources. First is a sort of empathy. We feel for other people's predicaments by imagining them to be our own, and as such we feel the urge to help them. Second is a notion of status or approval. We want to be seen to treat others well, and so we are always conscious of how our actions towards others would appear to an impartial observer, and try to act in ways that such an impartial observer would approve of. However, these are modified by another human factor, which is that the difficulties of others are necessarily less immediate to us than our own. We know this, and try to make up for it with empathy, but for instance: When we visit a family who has recent lost a loved one, we do so in the knowledge that no matter how much empathy we may feel we do not experience their grief as acutely as they do. Further, the acuteness with which we are able to sympathize with others' sufferings is related to how close they are to us in kinship and/or location. So we will naturally feel the death of a neighbor's child more acutely than we will the report that someone in China just experience the same tragedy.

Now note: These are moral observations rather than moral precepts. There's much more of psychology than of theology or philosophy here.

Let us now turn to capitalism. I would put it forward that the essence of capitalism is not "for there to be no limit at how much one can take for one’s self" nor indeed "the individual, the person-singular", though the latter is implied by capitalism and the former is sometimes allowed by it. Rather, I would say that the essence of capitalism is roughly this: That which you possess or produce is yours until you agree to give it to another in return for some mutually agreed upon good or service.

Why should people who are communitarian in outlook appreciate this?

Smith observes that our own troubles are naturally more immediate to us than those of others. As such, the baker will naturally be more conscious of his own family's need for food and his own desire to spend leisure time with his family than he will be of the hunger of the blacksmith's family. And the blacksmith will naturally be more conscious of his own needs for iron implements and for time with his family than he will be of the baker's need for iron implements.

Because of this, both men will be better served to rely upon the other's self interest than the other's beneficence. If the blacksmith gives the baker a new griddle in return for a week's bread, or if he pays the baker coin which the baker can then use to purchase clothes from the tailor or grain from the miller, he joins the baker's well being to his own well being.

Does this mean that capitalism suggests that everyone simply be greedy? Not necessarily. Greed is a passion for consumption, which seeks to take all things into oneself. What this principle of exchange is really based upon is relationship: If I want to get something from someone else, I may only do so by giving him something which is of equal or greater value to him. I must form a relationship (however tenuous) with him and give him something which he values in order to get from him what I value. Capitalism is thus at root a system which requires a certain degree of relationship and solidarity, as I cannot get anything without providing to others what they in turn need.

Now here is where I may lose my more left-leaning readers: I would put it that the advantage of capitalism (understood as the principle that we own what we have or produce and that in order to get me to part with those things which I own, you ought to propose a mutually beneficial exchange) is that it is the only means of moving goods around through society which does not rely on the threat of force. People often like to talk about the "inherent violence of capitalism" (I suppose because they picture the central image of capitalism being Mr. Moneybags forcing thousands of impoverished workers into a factory) but while capitalism theoretically rests upon mutually beneficial exchange, socialist/communitarian systems do in fact rest upon the implicit threat of violence. How so? Well, in our earlier illustration, if the blacksmith and the baker live in a socialist society, the reason for the baker to give bread to the blacksmith is the implicit threat of the political entity's monopoly on legal violence: If he doesn't give bread to everyone in the village someone will come and take it from him, or he will be punished for not doing his job.

Now, any reasonable polity must use its implicit threat of violence to exact a certain amount from people, in order to run the state and provide basic services to those who need them. But one reason why we ought to prefer that as much of the movement of goods and services within society be capitalistic rather than communitarian is that the former is based upon mutually beneficial exchange, while the latter on the implicit threat of violence. I would suggest that we ought to prefer that as much of the exchange in our society as possible be mutually beneficial rather than forced.

A brief concluding digression: I'm sure that someone will point out that in reality there is often so much inequality between the richest in a society and the poorest that it is impossible for them to be on an even footing to make mutually beneficial exchanges. Thus, with extreme inequality, people may be "forced" to work for wages which are not in fact adequate to sustain them. I would agree that extremes of inequality do allow capitalism to become much less beneficial for the have-nots. And to mitigate extreme injustices, the state doubtless sometimes has to use its implicit threat of force to protect the vulnerable. However, beyond assuring basic human needs are met, I would tend to support finding ways for the have-nots to be more productive in relation to the haves (and thus giving them more leverage when negotiating exchange) rather than a more radical leveling approach to bringing the haves down. I would imagine that nearly everyone supports both these methods to some extent, but the difference between left in right has a great deal to do with where one sees the proper balance between them.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

I suppose one should take these things seriously, but given the way the media has spun itself up about the slightest chance of a good pandemic (bird flu, SARS, and now swine flu) one can't help but great the whole thing with a little levity. Of course, I suppose the Sicilians thought it was pretty droll when a few Genoese ships ran aground full of rats and dead sailors back in 1347.

Some authorities object to calling the flu outbreak "swine flu". U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack expressed concerns that this would lead to the misconception that pork is unsafe for consumption. Israeli deputy health minister Yakov Litzman proposed the name "Mexican flu" because Muslims and Jews consider pork to be unclean, but the Israeli government retracted this proposal after Mexican complaints. The World Organization for Animal Health has proposed the name "North American influenza", while the European Commission uses "novel flu virus". Medical terminology refers to the virus as "Influenza A (H1N1) virus, human". "Flying pig flu" has been suggested as a more accurate description of the virus' genetic makeup, since it has elements of bird, swine, and human flus.

I'm all for "flying pig flu". That would allow me to say, "There'll be pork in the tree tops by lunch time," in my aging Katherine Hepburn voice.

Friday, April 24, 2009

I was struck by this Megan McArdle post, of which I will go ahead a quote a large chunk:

Guess what, honey? You're not entitled. You can do everything right, and the universe doesn't owe you anything. Neither do your fellow taxpayers. If there is any way to save the banking system without paying you $2 million a year, I will do it, not because I hate you and want to rob you, but because I don't want to pay more than I have to. You may have come across this concept in business school. At Chicago, we called it "a market".

The real problem with investment bankers goes deeper, and is the problem of the entire upper middle class: we have come to believe that complying with the rules produces excellent results as by some natural law. In school, if you do your work, teacher gives you an A. It comes to seem like a sort of a natural law: if you have a good education and work hard, the universe is supposed to reward you. After school, the upper middle class gravitates towards careers with very well defined advancement hierarchies: medicine, law, finance, consulting, where this subtle belief is constantly reinforced.

True, a lot of people fall by the wayside in the up-or-out structures of most of the top firms. But that was always true--the whole idea that you deserve to be rewarded for your hard work always involved ignoring the entirely undeserved natural endowment of intelligence and social capital that most upper-middle-class kids are given by their parents. The people who stay in the system and make it to the upper levels do not see it as mostly the product of luck; they view it as the just reward for all their hard work and sacrifices.

I include myself in this group. When I was laid off for a long time in 2002, I felt as betrayed by the universe as if the law of gravity had suddenly ceased to operate. I had worked hard, gone to an excellent business school, and I was supposed to have a job, just as an apple thrown into the air falls back to earth. I was angry, but also deeply shaken, by the notion that I could work hard, do everything right, and still end up unemployed.

We're watching the entire investment banking industry go through what I endured seven years ago. They aren't going to be paid so well in the future, even though they made the colossal mistake of giving up the best years of their lives to the finance industry. It feels--and it is--massively, nearly unfathomably unfair. On the other hand, that's a pretty good description of the universe: massive. nearly unfathomable. unfair.

Just ask any manager at Chrysler with two swell kids and a nice house in a Detroit suburb.

Anyone who has a halfway decent job is incredibly lucky--and yes, journalists and academics, complaining that it isn't fair you don't get paid much, that includes you. If your IQ had been forty points lower, or Mom had been on drugs, or you'd been born in Africa, you'd be spending your days doing hard, disgusting manual labor. The difference in utility between your salary and an investment banker's is trivial compared to the difference in utility between your salary and a Bangladeshi farmer's.

So for all the bankers annoy me, their pay--and its difference from mine--doesn't outrage me. The difference between their pay and that of a physical therapy assistant or an auto line worker doesn't outrage me. No one deserves their pay, so I can hardly be angry at the folks on Wall Street for taking what they could get. And so I wonder why so much of the commentary on Wall Street--not on the pay caps, but just on Wall Street in general--focuses on how much they were paid. Would it have been better if they had only been paid a third, or a tenth, or a twentieth as much? Would that make the recession significantly more enjoyable for the rest of us?

They made colossal mistakes, to be sure. But if you thought that high compensation was supposed to guarantee no errors, I have the same response to you that I have to the bankers: the universe does not owe you anything in the way of guarantees.

This fits with one of my pet intellectual hobby horses: that in modern society we have lost touch with the reality that life is often beyond our control. That one works hard does not necessarily mean that one's labor will bear fruit. That one is a good person does not mean that bad things won't happen to you.

Through most of human history, this reality was constantly impressed upon us by the fact that most people lived by subsistence farming, which meant they were constantly at the mercy of the weather, pests, diseases, etc.

In Victor David Hanson's lyric Fields Without Dreams about the vineyard in Calibornia's central valley which his family has owned for four generations, there's a scene in which he talks about how farmers confront nature's caprice. Hanson and his neighbors all grow grapes for raisins. To make raisins, the grapes are picked and laid out on drying trays to dry in the hot California sun. If it rains while your grapes are still out on trays, you lose the whole crop to a sodden, fermenting mess. If you pull your grapes in from drying too soon, they get lower raisins that sell for less. So each fall the growers are all watching the weather reports, looking at the skies, and judging when to pull their raisins in. One year Hanson and his brother rush to bring all the raisins in at the chance of a storm. Their old-timer neighbor leaves his out, convinced it won't actually rain. It does. And Hanson sees the old farmer the next day, looking over the ruin of his entire harvest and contemplating whether he'll take out one more loan to try to keep the farm or just sell out. "I just didn't think it would rain," the old man says.

Today, very few people in our country have to battle nature's capriciousness for their daily bread.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

With people focused on the economic downturn, many have found it a good time to give a little extra thought to whether other people are making more than they ought to. The president has spoken out several times against "excessive compensation" of executives, and a number of people have floated the idea of adjusting the top marginal income tax rate to effectively cap total compensation at ten million dollars a year. MZ tackled the question somewhat humorously here.

Beyond question, $10 million is a lot of money. Most of us will never see anything like that much money, and so it seems entirely reasonable to demand: Why should anyone be paid so much? What's so special about CEOs and actors and baseball players that they deserve tens of millions of dollars? Aren't they running off with the money that we should be getting instead?

I certainly wouldn't claim that executives are not often paid more than they are worth. A board of directors is still a group of people with emotional commitments (including wanting to assure themselves that they made the right pick in choosing the current CEO) and they will certainly not always do what is in their own best interest. Though we may be comforted that in a free economy the incentives are in place to automatically punish them for not doing so.

To look at an example of the impact of high executive compensation, I consulted the handy Executive PayWatch Database which my friends at the AFL/CIO put together for me. I picked Hewlett-Packard Company to look at. CEO Mark Hurd made $34,031,021 in total compensation in 2008. This, the AFL/CIO helpfully calculates for me is the same as 836 years worth of salary for the average worker. Should we be outraged?

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The team of healers stands up around the altar waiting for the line of faithful to approach them, and they are Betty Homemaker, Sue Teacher, Jack Plumber, Mike Lawyer. As I stand up at the altar with Sue Teacher’s hands on my head, why not entertain, just for a moment, the belief that the Spirit has animated her heart, mind and hands and is permeating into my body, making my thighs and calves feel jittery, causing me to tighten my shoulders and close my eyes. It is filling my body with hot coffee, pouring it in from the toes, up to the top of my head, capping me in warm foam, sending a delightful jitter into all my nerves. I am not just a person who drinks the drink anymore. I am the vessel in which the drink is poured and I contain all the caffeinated, alcoholic stimulants in the world without ever taking a sip. Who would not want to avail themselves of this feeling? Why aren’t all the bored teenagers and lusty old men of the world lining up for this high? Why not roll over towards my husband in bed with me and say, “Hey, feel like getting slain in the Spirit tonight?” If he had felt what I just felt, he would not say no.

I want the Charismatic experience to be authentic. I long for some psychic subrealm that allows unselfconscious and physical communication between God and me. And if this communication can be won with third party intervention, this intermediary laying-on-of-hands, rather than by my own concentration and spiritual discipline, all the better.

Yet, I remain a skeptic. I held my ground. I did not fall down. Is the warmth of someone’s hands on my head enough to give me chills? Is the intimacy of this little woman whispering in my ear, “Come back to me, My Child,” enough to bring tears to my eyes?

My family was involved in a Charismatic community when I was a teenager, and so I attended myriad healing masses and conferences and Life in the Spirit retreats. I found that I was unable to shut down my internal editor enough to stop analyzing my every little response. Was this the Spirit? Was that the Spirit? How do I differentiate between the Spirit and goosebumps or the warmth of comforting hand on my back? And what relief to finally stop resisting the earnest prayers and defying the waiting arms and the entreaties to just be more open, and drop into the eager solid arms. People who rail against peer pressure in schools have never been prayed over at a Charismatic meeting.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article today about marketing cleaning supplies in Italy. (I'd link to it, but you have to subscribe to their online edition to access it.) Here are some stats:

* Italian women spend an average of 21 hours a week on household chores (other than cooking). American woman, by comparison, spend only a fifth that much time cleaning.* Italian women wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week. American women wash them once a week. (I'm way behind by either standard.)* Italian women iron nearly all their wash, even down to socks and underwear. Sheesh!* 80% of Italians iron all their laundry* 31% have dishwashers* 1% have dryers

Perhaps if you don't have a dryer you have less clothing to take care of, so then you have more time to do all that ironing? I wonder if the sport of extreme ironing has taken off there in Italy.

Now, my house isn't filthy, but I really don't put in that much time cleaning -- I don't enjoy it much, to tell the truth. I guess that all told, I hit the four-hour average for American women, but I never think to dust, vacuuming is sporadic (especially upstairs because I have to lug my heavy vacuum up when I want to clean), and the kitchen floor is mopped infrequently. The laundry gets done (with the benefit of a dryer, I might add) but even if it gets folded it's not always put away. Some of this is due to my disinclination for the tasks, but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that whenever I dedicate myself to some job, I invariably hear crashes or squeals and find a disaster in progress.

My kids are climbers -- I find myself saying, "Get down! Get down!" so often I sound like a scratched disco record. But maybe climbing is the way the high shelves are going to get dusted, at least for now.

The other piece of note in the Journal is a review of a book called "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife". It's written by Caitlin Flanagan, a woman who stays at home -- not exactly stays at home with her kids, because she has a nanny, a maid, and a gardener -- and writes for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker about the Mommy Wars and the aftermath of feminism. The review assures us that she is indeed a charming, talented writer. Good for her. Less good is her own mothering style, which involves calling the nanny when things get sticky:

"Paloma, Patrick is throwing up!" I would tell her, and she would literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow feed him ice chips, sing to him. I would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up -- the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me.

Well, all right. I may only clean my house four hours a week, but when anyone in my house is sick, I'm there. And I don't think that a working mother who, after putting in a full day's work, picking up the kids, getting dinner, and packing everyone off to bed, has just put up her aching feet and sat down with Ms. Flanagan's book would feel at all charmed by an elegant turn of phrase here or a witty epigram there from a woman who won't even take care of her sick child in the middle of the night. I don't have to learn to love my inner housewife because being a housewife is simply what I do -- it's my full-time job, thank you very much. I may not be the world's most proficient cleaning lady, but when it comes to taking care of my family when they need me, I wrote the book.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the "Foundation" series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism'."

His Yale was "not George Bush's Yale," he says—no boola-boola, no frats or secret societies, rather "drinking coffee in the Economics Department lounge." Social science, he says, offered the promise of what he dreamed of in science fiction—"the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems. Sometimes there really are simple solutions: you really can have a grand idea."

This struck me because I read Asimov's original three foundation novels several times when I was in high school, yet the one thing that always really bothered me about the books was the idea that Hari Seldon and his psychohistorians could calculate out with precision everything that would happen for centuries. And even granted this determinist vision, it bothered me even more that the one great unpredictable factor was the character named The Mule, whom Seldon's equations could not predict the actions of because the Mule was a mutant and thus inherently a creature of randomness rather than predictability. The absurd premise and the absurd exception to it gnawed at me, though the great virtue of the books is that they are among the small number of science fiction books with the sort of grant historical sweep which a devotee of history cannot help but enjoy.

It's interesting to me that it was precisely the element of Foundation which I always disliked which attracted Krugman. And perhaps allows me to claim that my political aversion to the idea of the centralized technocratic view of politics is a philosophy that runs fairly deep.

Monday, April 20, 2009

First off, I want to know: who are these five people in the poll who only read my posts? I guess I'm flattered... Thanks for the vote of confidence? I have a feeling that if we'd put in an option stating, "I only read Darwin's posts" that he would have gotten a lot more than five votes. It's on now.

But seriously folks -- there is packing going on. We leave at 4 AM Saturday for an 18 hour drive to Ohio (straight through -- why not, ha ha?) so I have to Be Ready. I've already starting packing the kids' stuff, so if you see my children wandering around in ratty rags it's because all their other clothes are in a suitcase, and by gum, they'd better stay in that suitcase until Saturday.

I'd remembered that my friend Mrs. Big Tex had a packing checklist for vacations, and she's given me permission to post it. I'm using it to help keep all my ducks in a row. If you guys have other useful additions, or any tips for major family packing (as in, we need to pack for two weeks), please share and do your part to help us Get Out the Door at Four.

Do earlyTidy up outside, lock shedPut all important things in the safePut a hold on mailLine up a place for any petsPay the bills ahead or take them with youPlan for friend or neighbor to watch house, make sure they have a key and contact info for you.Light on a timer for appearance someone is home

Do the day you leaveTurn down (or up for you southerners!) thermostat to 55 degreesTake out the trashWash dirty laundryRinse dishes or run dishwasherTurn off ice machine on fridgePark off road (for those of us who usually park on the road and could get towed if we leave the car there for more than a couple days)Turn off Electricity to water heaterCheck to make sure freezer and fridge are closed securely

Friday, April 17, 2009

1.So here's something that will simultaneously denote me as someone who is "out of touch", and will cause a large number of people to skip to the next post: I saw, for the first time, an episode of "Hannah Montana". The premise of this entertainment is that a pop star can hide her identity and just blend in as a normal high school kid in Los Angeles! And that she can keep anyone from finding out that she's a pop star by wearing a wig! (The style of these Disney shows is so broad that it strikes me they could make a lot of money by sending out the scripts to high school drama departments and having them performed weekly nationwide. Why not have a nation of Hannah Montanas and collect mondo royalties at the same time?)

I have a bulletin for these folks. The average kid at La Canada/Flintridge High finds nothing unusual in moonlighting as a pop star, because they're all trying to break into the biz as well. I directed a Christmas pageant once for a private school in Pasadena, and amongst my (junior high) students was a actress/voiceover artist, and a ballerina who was out of school for several days because she was performing in The Nutcracker. No one thought it was weird, or treated these girls differently. Hello, it's Los Angeles! People move out there to make careers in entertainment!

I could go on, because the plot holes in Hannah Montana were of sufficient diameter to encompass Boston's Big Dig, but maybe that just proves that I don't "get it".

2. In regards to household-y stuff, I have two major pet peeves: people spilling glasses of liquid, and people tracking through a pile I'm trying to sweep up. Last week someone knocked over water into my pile of debris. I had to bite my tongue, and hard.

3. O frabjous day: it looks like (in addition to traveling for my sister's wedding and needing to refinance the house), we need to get our roof replaced. Always something, isn't it?

4. Speaking of Wedding, my sister is getting Married two weeks from today. Look for our travelogue from the Great Ohio Sojourn of Ought-Nine, coming soon to this space.

5. I'm sorry, you guys -- I have nothing more for you. It's a beautifully gray rainy day here, and it makes me want to crawl back in bed and snuggle under my duvet. So, a picture:

This is typical of the randomness that shows up on the camera when the girls get a hold of it, and it's a decent picture of The Floor. Respect the floor.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Because a good feature is a terrible thing to waste, we've instituted the first ever DarwinCatholic reader polling -- see right.

My main real question is: Do we have a lot of readership overlap between this blog and The American Catholic, where I also write, and so does my recent habit of cross posting my less overtly partisan political stuff to both sites annoy readers.

However, we ask that you answer all three questions to the best of your ability so that our highly trained consumer research department here at Casa la Darwin can make recommendations to us, as soon as they finish with their coloring books.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

It's fashionable at the moment write conservatism's epitaph. Such epitaph writing is not my project here, but there is a sort of inherent tension in the recent history of conservatism which I would like to examine briefly.

For the last hundred years and more, conservatives have often found themselves arguing against those in the political and economic spheres who believe that we can achieve a great improvement in society by instituting some sort of centrally controlled state economy. Socialism, communism and fascism all attempted, in different ways, to create new and better societies through assigning people roles and resources rather than allowing their allocation to occur through a decentralized system of millions of individual decisions taking place independently every day.

Perhaps this is the great modern temptation. People looked at the incredibly intricate (sometimes seemingly orderless) organization of society resulting from custom and the summed decisions of millions of individuals and thought, "Now we have the ability to plan all this instead and do it better!" Various sorts of ideologues tried to impose various sorts of new order on society, and conservatives dragged their feet and tried to keep things as they were, allowing people to make their own decision as they saw best whenever possible.

I think that conservatives have been right in this, but the difficulty is that in the process of defending freedom, we often fall into defending the ways people use freedom. We go from defending freedom to defending choice.

The example that springs most readily to mind is when a pro-life organization we donate to brought out Laura Ingram as a speaker a couple years ago. In her talk she made the toss-off comment, "Of course the Democrats in congress are wanting to increase environmental standards, so my broadcasting team and I all put in together to take out a lease on a new Hummer."

Now, I tend to think that CAFE Standards and other attempts to regulate the mileage cars get don't work very well. (Indeed, arguably the whole SUV craze was kicked off because fleet mileage regulations created and incentive to get customers who didn't like micro-cars into "light trucks".) So in regards to cars I'm in favor of freedom and against regulating behemoths like the Hummer out of existence. And yet, I see no reason to like the big ugly thing, which provides virtues neither of cargo capacity nor seating capacity. I'm against regulating against Hummers not because I'm in favor of Hummers, but because I don't think regulating against that sort of thing works very well. We should only regulate against things which represent a truly grievous harm to society and are easy targets for legislation.

The difficulty is, it's mentally difficult to defend against regulating people's behavior without slipping into actually supporting the behavior itself. And so it's easy to find oneself celebrating Hummers to spite the environmentalists, celebrating cigarettes and fatburgers to spite the health regulators, and declaring we have no obligation to help the poor to tweek the social democrats.

And yet many of the ways in which some people choose to use their freedom (over consumption, fiscal irresponsibility, lacking any sense of responsibility for other members of the community) in turn create the demand for just the sort of massive society-shaping programs which as conservatives we oppose. If we fail to stigmatize (or even celebrate) the bad behaviors which we maintain people's freedom to engage in, we create the environment in which people no longer see those freedoms as worth their cost.

I don't have a policy recommendation here. I don't suggest that we stop upholding personal freedom and distributed decision-making networks, nor is it possible to summon up a set of social stigmas from no where. But I do think that it's important that, even while opposing top down solutions to social and political problems, we make sure that we don't applaud choice simply because we uphold freedom. Somehow we must build a set of social judgments and stigmas such that we encourage people to use their freedom rightly. Otherwise we simply open the way for collectivist solutions which will try to use the blunt force of the law to regulate the most minute every-day decisions.

Yesterday a friend and I hauled all our children up to an expensive children's store so that I could find ivory shoes for three flowergirls. (Outfitting multiple children for formal events = $.)

Interlude. Why the specialty shop and not Payless? you demand. What kind of a ritzy millionaire is MrsDarwin anyway? A few reasons:

Payless is undeniably cheap -- both in terms of money and quality. It is my sister's wedding; I want the girls to look nice.

We pass down shoes through three children here. You get what you pay for. The name brand shoes tend to last longer and hold up better.

Said children's store was closing up at this location and was offering everything on discount, including their shoes, which are certainly very classic and elegant.

Anyway, I looked at Payless. The style of shoe I needed was unavailable in all three sizes, and they didn't carry it any more on their website.

The children (all eight of 'em!) had been very well-behaved in the store, mostly due to the video playing in the back corner of the store. As we left the store all that energy burst loose. All the way to the parking lot there was racing, climbing on the play equipment scattered throughout the mall, poking at the vending machines, and tug of wars as all the children tried to prevent each other from crossing the road unsafely. My friend and I thought our struggles were over when we reached our vans, and then one of the girls said, "Where's Julia?"

Every parent knows the conflicting emotions aroused by a child who has wandered off. Irritation: can't she just stay with me? Unease: wasn't she just with me? As I strode through the mall (after two failed scouting expeditions by the older boys) I ran split-second scenarios through my strategy mill. Should I linger near where we had shopped in case she came looking for us? Should I go to the office on the far side of the mall, in the opposite direction? Should I canvass all those stupid playgrounds?

How soon is too soon to panic? How late is too late?

Fortunately I didn't have to reach that stage. As I decided to head back to familiar ground, I heard running feet and sobbing behind me, and there was Julia catching up to me and choking out that she'd turned the wrong way to the parking lot, and then everyone was gone, and she couldn't find me, and she'd been looking all over... She held my hand and leaned against my side as we returned, weary but triumphant, to the parking lot where my friend watched the baby strapped in the van and the older children milling quietly.

And that night as I lay in bed, I gave thanks that I could drift off to sleep peacefully instead of laying awake with my stomach clenching in sick worry.

If she lives until term and through the delivery, she will be with us for only a few hours, perhaps a day or two. My wife is due in September, so we may have a long road ahead of us as we prepare simultaneously for our daughter’s birth, baptism, and burial. I admit a part of me wants this to be over sooner rather than later, but I also desire, hope, to hold my daughter, to listen to her newborn cries, to hold my wife as she nurses our hungry child, and to share as family those few precious moments of her life before we must say goodbye.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Over Holy Week some strange force caused the Harry Potter controversy to suddenly break out (like the story of the villagers of Eyam, subjected to a delayed-action outbreak of the Plague when a bolt of cloth carrying the fleas was brought out of storage) on our local Catholic homeschooler email list.

These discussions always seem to have two parts, first an explanation of how reading stories in which characters perform magic tempts children to occult practices, than an apologia for Tolkien and Lewis in which it is explained how these authors were Good Christians and their books are deeply Christian because: Aslan is God, good characters never do magic (unless they're not human characters, at which point it doesn't count), Galadrial is really Mary, the elves' lembas is the Eucharist, etc.

Two things annoy me about this whole set of arguments. The first is what strikes me as a Secret Decoder Ring Christianity approach to interpreting the meaning of fiction: It's always bad if main characters use magic, unless it's Gandalf, or Aragorn or Galadriel, because the main character won't identify with them and think they can do magic. And Dr. Cornelius in Prince Caspian is a half dwarf, so that doesn't count, and when Lucy does several spells out of a wizard's book in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that doesn't violate the principle either, because... Well, for some reason.

And Lord of the Rings is really Catholic because Galadrial is Mary (Have these folks read the Silmarillion? Who would have pictured Our Lady as having such a dark past!) and because lembas is the Eucharist and so on.

Oh, and dragons are always the devil, so any book where you befriend dragons is right out.

All of these rely on tiresomely direct equivalences which do not strike me as at all how one is meant to read fiction. Yes, Tolkien's work is deeply Christian, but not because he has direct correlaries for the Virgin Mary and the Eucharist in his story, but rather because Middle Earth works in the way the way that Catholics see the real world as working in certain key ways. Much of the Silmarillion is an extended meditation on the Fall. Now there are other key differences. There is no revelation in Middle Earth, and no organized religion to speak of. And Middle Earth includes elements which do not, to our knowledge, exist in the real world, such as the elves. However at a moral and theological level, Tolkien's world is recognizably Christian.

My second major beef with this whole line of argument is that it is, so far as I can tell, usually made by people who don't like reading genre science fiction and fantasy anyway. They accept Lewis and Tolkien and classic fairy tales because they've heard through Christian media that these are okay -- and they are blissfully unaware of what most mainstream Tolkien fans are like. (If you think Harry Potter fans are unusually prone to the occult and neo-paganism, spend some time hanging out on a Lord of the Rings fan board for a while. There's little difference.) But aside from the two blessed masters, a fair amount of the Harry Potter criticism strikes me as coming down to, "We don't like stories about imaginary worlds that work differently than ours."

Now, one is certainly entitled to not like fantasy, but I must admit that even though I've pretty much fallen away from the genre (at this point I only track the new books coming out from a few favorite authors) I continue to resent people who clearly don't like the genre as a genre -- indeed, don't like the very idea of the genre -- laying down precise schemas of rules according to which fantasy must be written lest it be of the devil.

The Harry Potter books are far from being the best fantasy or children's fantasy books out there. You or your children would not suffer greatly if you never read them. (Though they are rollicking good reads, and contain some genuinely powerful themes and images.) But I wish we could get away from this curiously dogmatic approach to how-fantasy-must-be-written which seems to have sprung up in some Catholic circles. It's an oddly fundamentalist viewpoint to take root among Catholics, and it really is quite unnecessary.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Friday, April 10, 2009

When Pilate saw that he was not succeeding at all, but that a riot was breaking out instead, he took water and washed his hands in the sight of the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood. Look to it yourselves."

And the whole people said in reply, "His blood be upon us and upon our children."

Then he released Barabbas to them, but after he had Jesus scourged, he handed him over to be crucified.Matthew 27:24-27

These short lines have, through the fallen nature of humanity, caused their fair share of trouble over the centuries. The gospel message, through primarily one of hope and redemption, contains one dark undertone: Christ died for our sins. The one truly perfect being suffered horrifically because of our too clear imperfection.

It is in our nature to shy away from that which is unpleasant, and so it is perhaps no surprise that throughout history some Christians have attempted to assuage their own consciences by pointing the finger of blame at an obvious target: the Jews.

The fact, clearly stated in the gospel accounts, that it was the Jews who turned Christ over to be killed, and that Jews in Europe lived as a people set apart from the rest of the population, made them a good target against which to shift any blame one might feel for Christ's suffering. Or perhaps the gospel account simply provided a good excuse for the all too universal desire to cultures to treat minorities badly.

Either way, there is unquestionably a history in Christianity of the thousand years or more of Christians at times treating Jews badly and using the above statement of accountability as an excuse.

In recent times, rightly seeking to avoid any anti-Semitism, some have found a new scapegoat for the crucifixion: the Roman authorities. According to this narrative, which seems popular both with those who like to think of themselves as wise enough to know what is really going on between the lines of scripture and those who consider themselves particularly adept at critiquing civil authority from a religious perspective, the real motive force behind Christ's execution was the civil authorities. Christ preached a message of radical liberation, and this threatened the political and economic status quo, so the Roman authorities killed him. However, by the time the Gospel writers sat down to write their accounts, they found it expedient to gloss over the fault of the Roman authorities and lay blame on the Jews -- thus making nice with the Romans and scapegoating a people already on the outs with the empire.

Since I had run across this latter view several times this year, but on articles in the press and in online conversations, I had it in mind as I was re-reading the Passion narratives during Holy Week this year. That one can find no basis for it in the Gospels themselves is, of course, accounted for by the theory itself, yet it struck me with renewed force that this approach to the question, "Who killed Christ?" is really no different in its failures that the anti-Semitic one.

In both cases, the answer is effectively stated as: the other. The Jews. The oppressive authorities. Anyone but me.

The real answer to the question, "Who killed Christ?" is: We did.

As the Gospel accounts tell us, a mob of Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover were stirred up by the Temple elders to call for Jesus' death, until the Roman authorities gave in to avoid a riot. Yet the meaning of this is not to be found in identifying some particular ethnic group or power structure to blame. Rather, we must think about who the Jews were, God's chosen people. The people who called out, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" were the only people in the world to whom God's law and prophesies had been revealed.

As Christians we believe that we now possess the fullness of God's revelation. We are God's people. Pius XI wrote, "Spiritually we are all Semites." And it should serve as a reminder to us of how right belief is no guarantee against pride or evil action. The leaders who called for the crucifixion were, like us, people who were the keepers of God's revelation on earth.

Hear the voices of the Narrator, Christ, and the Synagogue, in this noble narration which brings to life with a dramatic immediacy the events of the Passion, as the Gospel account unfolds. Meditate on the English translation as you listen, and allow the ancient language of the text, and the special Gregorian chant tone reserved especially for this holy season, to add a new depth and solemnity to your understanding of this familiar story.

For reading aloud to the children, we have some fine works by Inos Biffi and his talented illustrator, Franco Vignazia.

Story of the Eucharist is long for reading aloud in its entirety over a weekend, and needs a bit of on-the-fly editing for length (at least for the attention spans of the under-7 crowd), but it's a wonderfully illustrated history of the Eucharist in Catholic life. (The artist is honest -- he doesn't sugarcoat the bland ugliness of modern church architecture. Fortunately you only get a bit of that in the beginning and the end.)

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

1. I really need to write down some kind of schedule. Not just think it in my head, not just make up a plan for the day each morning. I need to put some thought into what happens tomorrow, next week, next month.

2. Action. This is the word that's been impressed upon me during these nine days. I have to act. It would almost be better for me to be engaged in non-essential activity that has a purpose and an end, than to spend my time sitting around thinking about doing something important. I know that this is not everyone's particular problem. Some people might need to slow down, or to be more deliberate, or whatnot. I think that the more time I spend in some action with a definite end, the better for me. Otherwise I just while away my day drifting from idleness to idleness, to the detriment of my household and family and schooling.

Even the action of writing out my reflections on my lifestyle has really helped me to clarify what I need to be doing to bring more order to my life.

If you've been praying the novena with me, and have come to any conclusions about bringing order to your own life (whether or not the conclusions are relevant to anyone else's life), please share your thoughts. Not everyone's routine has to be the same; as I think about it, the problem with a lot of lifestyle systems is that they're just too cookie-cutter.

For Ordering a Life WiselySt. Thomas Aquinas

O merciful God, grant that I maydesire ardently,search prudently,recognize truly,and bring to perfect completionwhatever is pleasing to Youfor the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God

Grant that I may knowwhat You require me to do.

Bestow upon methe power to accomplish your will,as is necessary and fittingfor the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,that I may not falter in timesof prosperity or adversity,so that I may not be exalted in the former,nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anythingunless it leads me to You;may I not be saddened by anythingunless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,nor fear to displease anyone,but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,be worthless to meand may all things eternalbe ever cherished by me.

May any joy without Yoube burdensome for meand may I not desire anything elsebesides You.

May all work, O Lorddelight me when done for Your sake.and may all repose not centered in Yoube ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,that I may direct my heart to Youand that in my failuresI may ever feel remorse for my sinsand never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make mesubmissive without protest,poor without discouragement,chaste without regret,patient without complaint,humble without posturing,cheerful without frivolity,mature without gloom,and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let mefear You without losing hope,be truthful without guile,do good works without presumption,rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,and -- without hypocrisy --strengthen him by word and example.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

I didn't forget about saying the novena yesterday -- I said it first thing. I didn't post it because I was sitting at the computer yesterday morning, clicking around, and didn't feel like interrupting my clickage to go copy the novena, paste it into a post, and write something pithy. So I didn't, and then I forgot about it. As I was in bed last night, all comfortable and falling asleep, suddenly I remembered: Aw, shoot, I didn't post the novena.

Which comes down to the question I've been asking myself lately: is this a productive use of my time? Posting the novena would have been a productive use of my time. Clicking around was not, as evidenced by the fact that I can't even tell you what or where I was reading around yesterday. Here are some of the numerous occasions lately when I've wondered whether I was really using my time most productively:

standing at the kitchen island reading the newspaper while chaos swirls around my feet and the baby cries somewhere

while sitting at the computer

while sneaking a few of the three-year-old's potty training candy bribes rewards.

while sitting at the computer

while staring out the window into space while not washing the dishes

when trying to figure out a crochet stitch, sitting next to mountains of unfolded laundry

while sitting at the computer

Here are some of the occasions where I figured that I actually was using my time productively:

laying on the bed watching the baby sleep or coo or be solemn. He's only this age once, and he's so adorable.

playing the piano in the evening. I'm trying to learn the aria from the Goldberg Variations, and Darwin finds it relaxing to listen, even if I'm not Murray Perahia.

saying the Liturgy of the Hours, even if the kids are fighting downstairs.

showing my daughters how to crochet during the school day. This is life knowledge, people.

while working out.

anytime I make a cup of tea.

For Ordering a Life WiselySt. Thomas Aquinas

O merciful God, grant that I maydesire ardently,search prudently,recognize truly,and bring to perfect completionwhatever is pleasing to Youfor the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God

Grant that I may knowwhat You require me to do.

Bestow upon methe power to accomplish your will,as is necessary and fittingfor the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,that I may not falter in timesof prosperity or adversity,so that I may not be exalted in the former,nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anythingunless it leads me to You;may I not be saddened by anythingunless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,nor fear to displease anyone,but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,be worthless to meand may all things eternalbe ever cherished by me.

May any joy without Yoube burdensome for meand may I not desire anything elsebesides You.

May all work, O Lorddelight me when done for Your sake.and may all repose not centered in Yoube ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,that I may direct my heart to Youand that in my failuresI may ever feel remorse for my sinsand never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make mesubmissive without protest,poor without discouragement,chaste without regret,patient without complaint,humble without posturing,cheerful without frivolity,mature without gloom,and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let mefear You without losing hope,be truthful without guile,do good works without presumption,rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,and -- without hypocrisy --strengthen him by word and example.

Monday, April 06, 2009

In my energy bill, I just came across an Earth Day pamphlet with a section on Fun Ways to Celebrate Earth Day! Included was this paragraph:

Plant an organic family garden. Working with your kids or spouse to design, plant, and grow your own vegetables is not only a great bonding experience but you're also rewarded with fresh, healthy produce throughout the summer and fall. And it's a great way to save money.

A great way to save money? Have these people ever planted a garden before? Maybe if you're on your second or third year of planting out an acre-sized plot, you might save some money by growing enough vegetables. Otherwise, the expenses of seeds, equipment, soil, fertilizer, trellises, root food, seed trays, and gardening books do add up, rather. Please tell me that the people who are so het up about Earth Day have actually try their own suggestions.

Sadly, I was never able to get far enough into this book to be able to give it a reasonable review. About halfway through, the author goes into chilling detail about his efforts to get rid of several of those pesky creatures that we call wildlife. When his efforts to keep said wildlife from his crops fail, he decides that they need to be killed. After his description of how he trapped an oppossum, left it in the sun to die and, failing that, tried to drown it (all witnessed by his children), I was finished with this book. The fact that this is offered up as humor makes me sick.

Philosophy is often seen as one of those highly impractical, strictly academic fields, and yet, it has a way of being at the root of everything.

I was struck, recently, by a contrast in two statements about medicine. In an article about the importance of finding medical ways to enhance female sex drive, I ran across a claim along the lines of, "Many experts believe that more than 50% of women over 30 suffer abnormally low interest in sex and would benefit from sexual drive enhancing medication if it became available." The immediate connection my mind made was: No more than 5% of the population is attracted primarily to his or her own sex, and yet this is not considered a medical abnormality.

These two together show that the medical community (and our society in general) clearly has some sort of philosophy of the human person and philosophy of sexuality, which is doubtless assumed and unstated. Women, it is believed, ought to have a sexual drive equal to that of men, regardless of whether that is what we find in nature or not. (Even though there are some obvious evolutionary reasons why males would be physically more interested in frequency of copulation than females.) And yet if one primarily experiences sexual attraction to one's own sex, even though that both "doesn't fit the plumbing" and is evolutionarily useless, that is perfectly fine and healthy, even if this is a condition found in only a small percentage of the population.

Medicine is, in its modern form, generally an empirical field. Yet the question of "What is normal?" and "What is abnormal?" is a question that we always answer philosophically rather than empirically.

Necessarily so. Often our sense of what "ought" to happen is directly contrary to the observed usual occurrence. "Health" is not simply what we observe to be the usual, otherwise we would consider the "healthy" result of a diagnosis of lymphoma to be death.

We chase the telos just as much as in Aristotle's time, and yet we do not acknowledge that what we are doing is anything other than an "empirical science".

Sunday, April 05, 2009

No, I didn't forget about the novena today. Rather, I was limiting my computer time. This wasn't a principled decision -- I was cleaning like a madwoman before Dorian came to visit. But it did make me reflect on a) how much I can get done if I start early; b) how much time I must waste in the morning on the computer; and c) the amazing sense of relaxation that comes from having the house mostly clean and then realizing that you were two hours ahead of schedule. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a pretty darn good feeling.

For Ordering a Life WiselySt. Thomas Aquinas

O merciful God, grant that I maydesire ardently,search prudently,recognize truly,and bring to perfect completionwhatever is pleasing to Youfor the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God

Grant that I may knowwhat You require me to do.

Bestow upon methe power to accomplish your will,as is necessary and fittingfor the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,that I may not falter in timesof prosperity or adversity,so that I may not be exalted in the former,nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anythingunless it leads me to You;may I not be saddened by anythingunless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,nor fear to displease anyone,but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,be worthless to meand may all things eternalbe ever cherished by me.

May any joy without Yoube burdensome for meand may I not desire anything elsebesides You.

May all work, O Lorddelight me when done for Your sake.and may all repose not centered in Yoube ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,that I may direct my heart to Youand that in my failuresI may ever feel remorse for my sinsand never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make mesubmissive without protest,poor without discouragement,chaste without regret,patient without complaint,humble without posturing,cheerful without frivolity,mature without gloom,and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let mefear You without losing hope,be truthful without guile,do good works without presumption,rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,and -- without hypocrisy --strengthen him by word and example.

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Grantthat with Your hardshipsI may be burdened in reparation here,that Your benefitsI may use in gratitude upon the way,that in Your joysI may delight by glorifying Youin the Kingdom of Heaven.

I found myself thinking of this line of the prayer last night after the parish fish fry had run out of fish when I was the next one in line, Red Lobster had an hour-long line snaking out the door, and Little Caesar's had run out of their "Hot 'n Ready -- no waits! no lines!" cheese pizzas. (They had plenty of pepperoni and sausage pizzas on hand, though.) Waiting five minutes for a cheese pizza after missing out on the fish that I would have seemed dramatic when I had a sinus headache and was already starving, but in reality it's so petty that offering it up probably only made reparation for my irritable attitude caused by the situation. A religious Catch-22.

For Ordering a Life WiselySt. Thomas Aquinas

O merciful God, grant that I maydesire ardently,search prudently,recognize truly,and bring to perfect completionwhatever is pleasing to Youfor the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God

Grant that I may knowwhat You require me to do.

Bestow upon methe power to accomplish your will,as is necessary and fittingfor the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,that I may not falter in timesof prosperity or adversity,so that I may not be exalted in the former,nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anythingunless it leads me to You;may I not be saddened by anythingunless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,nor fear to displease anyone,but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,be worthless to meand may all things eternalbe ever cherished by me.

May any joy without Yoube burdensome for meand may I not desire anything elsebesides You.

May all work, O Lorddelight me when done for Your sake.and may all repose not centered in Yoube ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,that I may direct my heart to Youand that in my failuresI may ever feel remorse for my sinsand never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make mesubmissive without protest,poor without discouragement,chaste without regret,patient without complaint,humble without posturing,cheerful without frivolity,mature without gloom,and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let mefear You without losing hope,be truthful without guile,do good works without presumption,rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,and -- without hypocrisy --strengthen him by word and example.

Well yesterday was a long day for Christa and myself. We arrived at the hospital Thursday morning at 6:00. Christa was doing her best to cope with whatever the outcome of the surgery would be. Prior to being taken to the operation room, she predicted to one of the physicians they would not find any cancer. For days now Christa has mentioned to me that she did not feel like she had cancer anymore, so her prediction to the doctor was no surprise to me. My prayer has been that she would be healed, so I too hoped for the same. We have been praying for healing through the intercession of John Paul II and April 2nd will be his feast day when he is canonized. JPII died on April 2, 2005. In the Catholic faith, we generally celebrate a saint’s feast day on the day they died. Just in case anyone is wondering, Christa did not intentionally schedule the surgery for April 2nd, so this too was a reason why Christa is convinced she has been healed from cancer.

The medical staff took Christa to the operating room and I sat and waited. The surgery lasted for nearly 5 hours. Finally one of the surgeons came out of the operating room and provided an update to me in the waiting room. He advised the following:

We are very happy to receive the good news. We will know the lab results for the lymph nodes/tumor next week, so we are still praying they will not find any cancer cells. It appears the radiation and chemo Christa received has worked so far, so we are still hoping everything will come out negative. As you can imagine, Christa is in pain which is to be expected. We are not sure how long she will be in the hospital.

I've always loved the idea of the Liturgy of the Hours, even though I've never said it regularly. During Lent I've been saying Lauds, or Morning Prayer, and I've started to see some differences in my day. It used to be that I thought a successful day was a day in which nobody did anything to make me angry. Now a successful day is a day in which I don't get angry at anything anyone does. My kids can tell you the difference.

For Ordering a Life WiselySt. Thomas Aquinas

O merciful God, grant that I maydesire ardently,search prudently,recognize truly,and bring to perfect completionwhatever is pleasing to Youfor the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God

Grant that I may knowwhat You require me to do.

Bestow upon methe power to accomplish your will,as is necessary and fittingfor the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,that I may not falter in timesof prosperity or adversity,so that I may not be exalted in the former,nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anythingunless it leads me to You;may I not be saddened by anythingunless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,nor fear to displease anyone,but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,be worthless to meand may all things eternalbe ever cherished by me.

May any joy without Yoube burdensome for meand may I not desire anything elsebesides You.

May all work, O Lorddelight me when done for Your sake.and may all repose not centered in Yoube ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,that I may direct my heart to Youand that in my failuresI may ever feel remorse for my sins and never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make mesubmissive without protest,poor without discouragement,chaste without regret,patient without complaint,humble without posturing,cheerful without frivolity,mature without gloom,and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let mefear You without losing hope,be truthful without guile,do good works without presumption,rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,and -- without hypocrisy --strengthen him by word and example.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

I recently went through the springtime of my discontent with how homeschooling was proceeding, and was about to throw it all up and start a new system. I read up on it, made a few plans, and even went to far as to go down to IKEA to pick up a catalogue so I could plan out a system of shelving and room organization. Fortunately, the store was out of catalogues. "And we won't be getting any more in until the new ones are printed in June," the sales associate told me.

June. After the school year is over. I took it as a sign that we need to persevere and try to perfect what we're doing now, instead of taking the easy route of starting afresh. It's always tempting to think that if we could just start over with a new system, this time everything would fall into place! Let's call this the fallacy of Bullwinkle: "This time for shure!" But there's often more advantage, though it might be harder work, in reassessing and cleaning up a system that's started to conform to one's own family. In fact, seeing where my schedule has failed is pretty valuable information, because it shows me how we've altered our original schema to fit our family's natural rhythms.For Ordering a Life WiselySt. Thomas Aquinas

O merciful God, grant that I maydesire ardently,search prudently,recognize truly,and bring to perfect completionwhatever is pleasing to Youfor the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God

Grant that I may knowwhat You require me to do.

Bestow upon methe power to accomplish your will,as is necessary and fitting for the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,that I may not falter in timesof prosperity or adversity,so that I may not be exalted in the former,nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anythingunless it leads me to You;may I not be saddened by anythingunless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,nor fear to displease anyone,but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,be worthless to meand may all things eternalbe ever cherished by me.

May any joy without Yoube burdensome for meand may I not desire anything elsebesides You.

May all work, O Lorddelight me when done for Your sake.and may all repose not centered in Yoube ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,that I may direct my heart to Youand that in my failures I may ever feel remorse for my sins and never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make mesubmissive without protest,poor without discouragement,chaste without regret,patient without complaint,humble without posturing,cheerful without frivolity,mature without gloom,and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let mefear You without losing hope,be truthful without guile,do good works without presumption,rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,and -- without hypocrisy --strengthen him by word and example.

I've seen a lot shakier plots used to justify some sweeping conclusions, and if those were justified, well, then I'm forced to conclude that Mexican lemons have improved highway safety a great deal. The vitamin C, maybe? The fragrance? Bioflavanoids?

This is particularly tricky when you bring time into it, because things trend--as we get richer, we buy safer cars, get better emergency rooms, etc. We also import more lemons to make our chi-chi cocktails and lemon meringue pies. Overlay the two, and you've got a hell of a causal relationship.

But I expect that four years from now, we'll still be having the same conversations with proponents of "cancer clusters" and Democrats convinced that they can scientifically prove that Democrats are better for GDP by doing ham-fisted regressions of Democratic presidencies with a few tightly correlated economic variables. What's the mechanism? What makes electric power lines cause cancer, but not the earth's vastly more powerful magnetic field? What policies did Harry Truman and Bill Clinton have in common (but not with Richard Nixon) that caused this marvelous confluence? Well, maybe we don't know the mechanism exactly, but never you mind: just look at that bee-yoo-ti-ful correlation!

On less political issues, I find myself dealing with these kinds of "analysis" at work all the time. As in all things, common sense is in order. If there's no reasonable explanation for any sort of causal relationship between two factors, then consider very seriously the possibility that there is none.

I wish I had the years behind me to get away with the Professor's recurring line from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: What do they teach them in schools these days?

Canto 24 is taken up with the climb of the three poets from the terrace of greed to the terrace of lust, and an extended conversation they have along the way in which Statius explains for Dante's benefit the relationship between the physical body and the soul (according to a mix of theology and Aristotelian biology) and how this accounts for the fact that the bodies of the souls in purgatory cannot die yet can suffer the visible deprivations of hunger. This is a sort of Aristotelian SciFi element to the Divine Comedy which, though doubtless fascinating to its medieval readers, often give the work a reputation for being hard to understand among 20th century readers.

At last, the poets come reach the next terrace, much of which is covered by a wall of fire. They begin to move carefully along the edge of the terrace, with fire to the left and a precipice to their right, and soon realize that there are spirits moving through the fire, and calling out to one another encouragement in the form of examples single and marital of chastity from Christian history and pagan mythology.

From inside the fire, souls call out to Dante asking him who he is that he walks unburned and still in his mortal body, but as he is about to explain he sees another group of souls coming through the fire walking in the opposite direction of those who have stopped to speak to him.

For down the middle of the burning roadCame people with their faces oppositeTo these, and they made me stare in suspense.

There I saw all the shades on either sideHurrying and kissing one anotherWithout halting, content with this brief greeting:

As ants in black battalions rub their muzzles,One with another, so as to seek out,Perhaps, their prospects and their way ahead.

As soon as these break off their friendly welcome,Before they take the first step to set off,Each one attempts to outshout all the rest,

The newcomers crying "Sodom and Gomorrah!"The others, "Pasiphae climbs in the cowTo let the bull come gallop to her lust!"

Then just like cranes that fly away, someTo the Riphean mountains, some toward the sands,These to escape the frost and those the sun:

One group of people leaves and one comes on,And they return in tears to their first chantsAnd to the shout most suitable for them.(Purg. XXVI, 28-48)

[Note: In Greek mythology, the Cretan queen Pasiphae was taken with a lust for a bull as a result of a spell put on her by the god Poseidon. She had a wooden cow (with necessary openings) made for her so that she could attract the bull's attention, and as a result conceived the Minotaur, half man and half bull.]

Once the other group of souls has moved off, those who had first asked Dante for his story repeat their request, and he explains about how Beatrice's prayers have resulted in the gift of a chance to travel through hell, purgatory and heaven in order that he may return to the road of virtue. Dante then asks the souls the nature of the other group which just passed going in the other direction and they explain the nature of their own sins and those of the other group of souls.

"The people who don’t come with us offendedBy that same sin for which Caesar in triumphOnce heard a voice call out against him, ‘Queen!’

"And that is why they run off shouting ‘Sodom!’Railing against themselves, as you have heard,And so support the burning with their shame.

"In sinning we were heterosexual:But since we did not yield to human law,Following our appetites like beasts,

"To heap opprobrium upon ourselves,Leaving those shades, we blare the name of herWho bestialized herself in beast-like planks.(Purg. XXVI, 76-87)

Dante's point here about the two forms of sexual sin (gay and straight) is interesting: He labels both sodomy and "straight" fornication and adultery as sins against nature, the former for obvious reasons and the latter because they violate the state of faithful natural marriage. Because Dante sees monogamous fidelity as the natural state of the human person, even "straight" sexual sins are deformations of nature's intent.

Sinners gay and straight now share a brief embrace and kiss as they pass each other in the flames, in sign that they now understand the right place of physical affection and do not allow it to be a lure which draws them from the path towards salvation.

The shades speaking to Dante then introduce themselves personally. They prove to be authors of courtly Italian love poetry, which was a great influence on Dante's early style, and the poets take a few moments to express admiration for each others' work before the penitents continue their journey through the flames and Dante (after promising to pray for them) continues along the terrace with his guides.

A little way further and Dante reaches his most difficult point yet on the journey which has taken him from the wasteland of sin, through hell and repentance to this point. They reach the pass up from the terrace of lust, guarded by the angel of chastity.

He stood upon the bank, outside the flames,And sang aloud, "Blessed are the clean of heart!"In a voice far more alive than ours.

Then, "You may go no further, holy souls,Unless the fire sting you: enter it,And don’t be deaf to what is sung beyond,"

He said to us when we drew near to him;And when I heard him speak so, I becameLike someone buried in the pit, alive.

I now arched forward over my clasped hands.Staring at the fire, I clearly picturedHuman bodies I had once seen burned.

My kindly escorts turned in my direction,And Virgil said to me, "My son, there mayBe suffering here, but there can be no death.(Purg. XXVII, 7-21)

Despite Virgil's reassurances, Dante is terrified of going through the fire. When Virgil does convince him to go through, it is only with Virgil reminding Dante that it is only by going through the fire that Dante can see Beatrice again.

It's interesting, I think, that this last penance is one suffered at least briefly by every single soul, and which Dante himself (who has not yet actually been subjected to any punishments or penances in his journey through the afterlife) too must suffer from the flames that purge away lust. Lust is, after all, one of the most basic of human sins, and is found admixed in even the most virtuous married relationships. While it was not through sexual sin that Adam and Eve fell, the first sign of their fall was when they realized that they were naked, and became ashamed. As John Paul II pointed out, writing 700 years after Dante, the first result of the fall was that Adam and Eve each realized that they were capable of taking sexual advantage of the other, and as such sought to protect themselves from each others' gaze.

At last, Dante follows Virgil into the fire.

At that he shook his head and said, "What’s this?You’d have us stay on this side?" Then he smiled,As one does at a child won by an apple.

Then he stepped in the flames ahead of me,Requesting Statius, who a long way nowHad walked between us, to approach behind.

Once in the fire, I would have flung myselfInto molten glass to feel cooled off,The burning heat inside was so intense.

My tender father, trying to comfort me,Kept talking about Beatrice as we walked,Saying, "I seem to see her eyes already!"

A singing voice, beyond, was guiding us;And we, while listening all the time to it,Came outside at the point which starts to climb.(Purg. XXVII, 43-57)

Dante finds himself now on the ascending stair from this last terrace of penance. However, sunset and darkness falls on the poets, and they are forced to take their rest on the steps, spending one last night in Purgatory.

Taking one more moment on this last terrace of purgation, in which Dante share (however briefly) in the redemptive suffering, the contrast between the punishments of Purgatorio and Inferno strikes me yet again. Though Dante certainly gives us a powerful image of the heat (wishing he could throw himself into molten glass to cool himself) he spends far more time on his effort to gain the strength of will to enter the fire, and to keep moving through it. No one will push Dante into the fire. While in the Inferno demons, fellow sinners and other keepers constantly force the damned back into their punishments, and capture them if they try to escape, the "punishments" of the Purgatorio are all voluntarily assumed. Dante could, should he have chosen, waited indefinitely on the terrace, refusing to enter the fire.

Climbing a mountain really is the ideal metaphor for Purgatory and for the efforts at spiritual and moral self improvement in life which Purgatory, in Dante' and the reader's earthly lives, represents. It is a difficult task requiring effort and at times suffering, but undertaken because one knows and desires the goal.

No one is going to do anything to these penitents in Purgatory, but they choose to undergo these sufferings because they know that only through the purgation of disordered habits and loves can they reach the promised goal of heaven.

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